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IntroComp 2017

IntroComp is a yearly IF competition for just the beginnings (or, in this case, just an excerpt) from a longer work, allowing authors to test the waters and get feedback about how well their concept is playing. You too can participate, if you wish, by trying out the games and then voting before August 31.

Of the intros I’ve had time to sample, these are the ones that most intrigued me:

Onna Kabukiby Victor Ojuel had the best story hook of the intros I tried: a protagonist with a clear identity, in a dire situation, with lots of reasons to have strong feelings about what happens. As the name suggests, this piece is set in Japan, among warring nobility and traveling monks. In parser IF, feudal Japan is a rarely used setting with just a handful of examples.

The implementation was a bit rockier, unfortunately: I several times got the game into a state that didn’t seem to be anticipated, and in one case that prevented me from making progress at all and I had to restart.

The Adam and Eve Project by Brian Kwak (How to Win at Rock Paper Scissors, among others) is a dual-protagonist game with the option to switch between viewpoints and command either PC. This is an intriguing approach for parser IF, allowing for characters who describe the same environments in different ways (Suspended, Exhibition, Common Ground) or who have to collaborate somehow using different powers or tools (Max Blaster…, the Earth and Sky series). In this variant, the protagonists are in constant communication after the very beginning of the game, so you always have the other character commenting on what you run into.

So far, at least, this is very much in the Mostly Puzzle genre, similar to How to Win… or the works of Arthur DiBianca. In its current state, The Adam and Eve Project also missing some scenery, and a couple of prominently mentioned exits give “you can’t go that way” responses: maybe that’s meant to indicate the borders of the introduction, but it would have been nicer to get some kind of response that that area is beyond the limits of the current implementation, rather than just an error message.

I also felt that the opening could have been a bit streamlined: after a simple intro puzzle, there’s quite a bit of dialogue dump. That’s personal taste about pacing of parser intros, perhaps. At any rate, I got stuck before reaching any official conclusion to the introcomp sample, and I’m not sure whether that is because I ran out of currently-available content or whether I was just being dense about a couple of the clues.

Sherlock Indomitable promises to continue exploring those possibilities, in the process implementing the content of some of the classic Doyle stories. I can see the appeal of using the originals, since you can’t get more authentically Holmesian. And the game uses a number of specific phrases from the original — including a bit about rousing the “snakish temper” of a creature at a certain point — which makes the prose more distinctive.

But it’s a tricky strategy. For one thing, you run the risk that the player will have already encountered the original stories and know their outcomes. For another, not everything in Doyle makes a comfortable transition to the modern day. In the adaptation of the speckled band story, Rushton imports the “band of gypsies” from Doyle’s original version, where they are treated as inherently suspicious individuals. That portrayal of Roma people feels rather uncomfortable. (Edited to add: the author is not allowed public comment during the IntroComp judging period, but got in touch to let me know that he’s decided to rework the story to remove negative references to the Romani people — so this should not be an issue in the final release.)

At the same time, the content here is pretty substantial and well-implemented, and I found it enjoyable to play. The linking of concepts and actual real-world movement makes the experience a little more open than the (also excellent) Sherlock game Toby’s Nose, while the tone is more serious and less pastiche-like than the Victorian Detective series; and the chains of logic are a bit simpler than in the Peterkin Investigates games. So this promises to be a solid entry to the genre of detective parser IF.

Honorable mention: Duckman, by Peregrine Wade, describes its protagonist thus: “Let’s face the facts: you are a giant, anthropomorphic duck wearing a weatherworn trenchcoat and a black sombrero.” I enjoyed the implication that I’d been trying to conceal this unhappy truth from myself until I finally broke down and typed X ME.

All of these are parser games. There are also several Twine pieces in this IntroComp, but it just happens this year that the entries that most caught my imagination were all parser samples.

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2 thoughts on “IntroComp 2017”

Thank you for linking to the article on anti-ziganism. While I knew gypsies and Travellers had been marginalized in the past, I was not aware of the horrible conditions they live in today. It made me feel sick to my stomach reading some of the things that have occurred even in the last 20 years.

The removal of the prejudicial depiction of “gipsies” from the excerpted text of “The Speckled Band” will have three critical effects. It will eliminate Doyle’s signature ‘red herring’ strategy from this story. It will hide the way Doyle creates red herrings by inciting the reader’s existing prejudices. It will diminish the character Holmes as a model for a modern, rational man whose logical procedures consistently allow his mind to triumph over bias (racial, ethnic, class, national). In this way, Doyle exposes the logic of late 19th century, British, Imperial bias, though most readers miss this part, being irremediably committed to that bias themselves. The disarticulation of the illogic of dominant systems of prejudice has value. Value could be added by making Holmes’ ability to overcome the blindness and forgetting required by British systems of inequality derived from class, nation, and race, explicit rather than implicit, “Yes, Watson, your suspicion of the “gipsies” derived, not from facts, but from a popular and regrettable fancy that holds, without evidence, that all criminals are immigrants, drifters, and poor. Roylott, a scion of an esteemed family, whose fore fathers evidenced a sustained profligacy, was rendered murderous by his experience in India. Once you come to believe that some people exist to provide you with a means for personal enrichment, it is nearly impossible to stem the desire to turn all people, even members of your own family, into money-making opportunities, existing solely to benefit yourself. His family history and its social prestige, transformed the murderous rage he evinced in the colonies into cool calculation.” Or, a “gyspy” character could be created who provides a critique of Roylott from within that stigmatized culture, perhaps with a dismissal of the history of the word, “Gypsy”. Doyle’s text may benefit in this way more from amendment than trimming.